The present research will investigate the behavior of parole decision makers as they search for information, utilize past experience, make inferences, and produce a decision. In particular, the research will apply the theoretical and empirical work arising from laboratory studies of causal attribution and decision making with an information processing framework, to the parole decision process. The goals of the research are to increase the knowledge of the parole decision process, with attendant policy implications including the improvement of parole decisions, to provide additional support and generalizability to the theories, and to promote a more closely integrated approach between attribution theory and information processing psychology. Six studies will be conducted. Subjects will include expert parole decision makers, and college students, used to develop tests and procedures. The first study establishes a data-base of 1000 actual parole decisions including archival coding of case files, parole outcomes (post-release follow-up), and post-decision questionnaires of Hearing Examiner's inferences and judgments. Summaries of these cases form the stimuli for other studies. Two studies will experimentally investigate the role of causal attributions in the parole decision by manipulating information in the case summaries. One study will examine verbal protocols from Hearing Examiners as they examine actual case files, including manipulations designed to test the effect of crime seriousness and crime type (person vs. property) on decision processes and outcome. One study will investigate the process by which parole decision makers combine case-specific information with base-rate or consensus information into a final parole judgment. The remaining study will create a questionnaire measure of the individual decision maker's goals and beliefs about crime causation and the efficacy of alternative responses in meeting the goals. This measure will be related to responses in the other studies.